Dear Reader,

On May 6, 2006, I watched a young Thoroughbred race into history. Two weeks later, I sat horrified as that same horse shattered his leg.

I don’t know what it was about that valiant horse, but his fight to survive touched me deeply. For months I checked his progress, cheering at every improvement—and feeling my heart break when ultimately he lost his battle.

The horse was Barbaro, and his story was the stuff true page-turners are made of.

During that time, I was contacted about THOROUGHBRED LEGACY, and I immediately knew fate had handed me the opportunity to pay tribute to Barbaro, and the incredible people who loved him.

So sit back and let me take you to Australia, where a man named Tyler will do anything to protect a legacy forged in sweat and tears and dreams. Faced with tragedy, he discovers that second chances sometimes come from the most unexpected places….

Jenna Mills

Darci’s Pride

Jenna Mills

www.millsandboon.co.uk

JENNA MILLS

Bestselling author Jenna Mills has been creating stories for as long as she’s been able to string words together. A daughter of the South, she grew up immersed in legend and lore, the abiding love of family and, of course, romance. Today, these are the elements that shape her stories.

A member of Romance Writers of America, Dallas Area Romance Authors and North Louisiana Storytellers, Jenna has earned critical acclaim for her stories of deep emotion, steamy romance and page-turning suspense, including the 2007 Gayle Wilson Award of Excellence. Darci’s Pride is Jenna’s seventeenth book for Harlequin/Silhouette.

When not writing, Jenna spends her time with her husband and young daughter in a house full of cats, dogs, plants and books! You can visit Jenna at her Web site, www.jennamills.com.

There are many kinds of love: that between man and woman, parent and child, man and the land, man and animal. Darci’s Pride, a story that explores each of these facets, is dedicated to Team Barbaro, in particular the dedicated staff at the University of Pennsylvania’s New Bolton Center and all the FOBs (Friends of Barbaro) who give so tirelessly of themselves to make sure Barbaro’s legacy lives on.

Acknowledgments

A special thank-you to Melissa James

for all things Australia, Linda Castillo and Ken Casper

for all things equine, and to Stacy Boyd and

Marsha Zinberg for inviting me into the

exciting world of THOROUGHBRED LEGACY!

CONTENTS

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Epilogue

Chapter One

He stood beneath the gnarled branches of an old gum tree. The late-summer sun baked the normally lush land of Australia’s Upper Hunter Valley, but the heat did not seem to touch him. He stood with uncanny ease despite his size, concealing the intense focus that simmered beneath the surface.

A mere passerby would never know someone wanted him dead.

“Came in the mail, just like the first one.”

With a foot perched on the bottom rail of a freshly painted white fence, Tyler Preston looked from the newsprint his trainer had just handed him to the gorgeous Thoroughbred in the pasture. Lightning Chaser grazed quietly, as he always did, but Tyler knew the horse too well to fall for the illusion. He’d helped deliver the colt one damp spring night three years before. He’d been there when the big mare went into distress. He’d gone down on his knees and helped her through her delivery. He’d been the first to see the foal.

The first one to…know.

Even then, in the first minutes following birth, Lightning Chaser had been tall, with the kind of presence a gangly newborn rarely possessed. There in the brightly lit barn, he’d lifted his head and shown off his blaze, and Tyler had rocked back on his haunches and…known.

This was the horse.

It was a big dream, an even bigger responsibility to heap on one so young, but big dreams and big responsibilities were something Tyler knew well. He’d been given the dream by his father. He’d blown the responsibility all by himself.

It was up to him to restore Lochlain Racing to the respectability he’d trashed through one careless mistake.

And Lightning Chaser was the horse to do it.

The big bay colt stood benignly in the shadow of that lone tree, ears perked, tail swishing rhythmically. In three years they’d come far. As a two-year-old, Lightning had burned up the track, garnering seven wins to only two losses. He’d come on strong at the prestigious Queensland Stakes, pulling away from the pack and engaging the favorite in a thrilling dash for the finish.

More Than All That had crossed first.

Tyler had been disappointed, but had set his sights on the upcoming Outback Classic—until his trainer had walked into his office the following morning. More Than All That had been disqualified. Steroids had been detected in his blood. Lightning Chaser, who’d run a close second, was named the official winner.

The racing community reeled. Allegations of fraud in the sport, quiet since the mysterious death of another race-horse, resurfaced. Everyone had their own opinion about who’d doped Sam Whittleson’s horse—and why.

Tyler’s name had been on just about every short list.

An ocean away, in America, another branch of the Preston family had been going through an equally nasty scandal.

That’s why his cousin Andrew, one of the Kentucky Prestons, had decided to run for presidency of the International Thoroughbred Racing Federation. To restore dignity to the Preston name—and integrity to the sport of kings.

With a twist to his gut, Tyler glanced down at the bold words scrawled atop the picture of Lightning Chaser. “Unmarked envelope?”

Daniel Whittleson nodded. “Just like the one my father received.”

The two had known each other since they were boys, when Daniel’s father had worked as a trainer at Lochlain. Sam had gone on to travel the world, eventually returning to Australia, where he’d fulfilled his dream of opening his own stables.

Daniel had stayed in America, working for Tyler’s uncle until eight months before, when he’d finally come home after a dispute over water rights had landed his father in the hospital.

“How’s he holding up?” Tyler asked.

“Still drinking more than I would like.” A quietly serious man, Daniel looked off in the distance, where beyond the drought-parched hills, his father’s property lay. “I’m not sure he’s ever going to get over losing the Queensland.”

It had been awkward. Daniel, Sam Whittleson’s own son, had returned to Australia to take over the training of Lightning Chaser. The racing community had had a field day with Daniel’s so-called desertion of his father. And though his friend seemed impervious to the criticism, Tyler knew it burned.

“No one really believes he drugged his own horse,” Tyler said. Sam would have had to have been crazy to do so. Not only was he guaranteed getting caught, but More Than All That had been a favorite. The horse could have won easily without the aid of an illegal substance.

But that was a chance someone hadn’t been willing to take.

“I know that,” Daniel said, squinting against the glare of the sun. Over three weeks had passed since the last rain, and that had only been a few drops. “And rationally he does, too. But…”

The words trailed off. Both men knew. Much like the impact of the drought on the land, the damage had been done. Sam’s name had been smeared. His stables were tainted.

It was a situation Tyler knew well.

“He’ll rebound,” he predicted. That’s what his own father had promised him six years ago. They’d stood just inside Lochlain’s newly completed state-of-the-art barn. But instead of colts and fillies shuffling in their stalls, there’d been only the smell of hay and tack, and the sound of silence. In the parking area beyond the paddock, the banker had been sliding from his dust-covered sedan.

The word foreclosure had stuck in Tyler’s gut.

One mistake, that’s all it had taken. One lapse in judgment. One touch—

Tara.

His mouth flattened. Letting out a rough breath, he focused on Lightning Chaser, standing tall and proud in the hot breeze. But he saw her anyway, as she’d been that very first time, that very first night—the straight, sunshine-blond hair and sparkling blue eyes, the wide, teasing mouth. Smiling, laughing. Lying.

The memory seared.

Shoving it aside, Tyler lowered the brim of his bush hat and turned toward Daniel. “It just takes time.”

And distance.

“I talked him into going on safari,” Daniel said. “Bought the tickets and took him to Sydney last night. His plane left a couple of hours ago, at ten, I think.”

“Well, there you go. That should be—” Tyler stopped, Daniel’s words registering. “A couple of hours?” Glancing at the watch his father had given him on his eighteenth birthday, a watch that had been in the Preston family for generations, he swore softly.

He’d completely lost track of time.

“Late?” Daniel asked.

“Andrew’s campaign manager.” She’d cooked up some big gala fund-raiser at Lochlain for the night after the upcoming Outback Classic. With that date closing in on them, she’d insisted they needed to meet in person to finalize details. Tyler didn’t much care about invitations or napkins, but he did care about his cousin. And horse racing. And if the fund-raiser could help Andrew garner Aussie support, then Tyler would do his part. His cousin had been staying at Lochlain since arriving in Australia, using the stud as his base of operations.

The last thing they needed was the Australian candidate, media mogul Jackson “Jacko” Bullock, winning.

“We were supposed to meet at one.” It was now one-thirty.

“I’ll finish up with Lightning,” Daniel offered.

“Thanks, mate,” Tyler said, glancing toward Midnight Magic, the sleek black horse Daniel had raced out to the back pasture. Taking the reins, he slipped his foot into the stirrup and swung his leg over the horse’s back.

“Wish me luck,” he muttered, then with a gentle nudge to the horse’s sides, put the animal into a lope toward the main complex.

A few white clouds drifted across the western horizon, but Tyler knew they would not bring rain. His pop had taught him that, how to tell which clouds brought rain and which only teased, just as David Preston had taught his son how to run a stud farm. The son of an Irish horseman, David had tried to pass on all that his own father had taught him, but Tyler had needed little teaching. He’d been riding before he’d started running.

It was in the blood, David had decided. His eldest son had received the Preston horse gene. His younger, Shane, had not.

With the blistering sun beating down on him, Tyler urged Midnight Magic toward one of the three barns on the far side of the paddock. A fourth was under construction. The mares and new foals had claim to the largest structure. His two- and three-year-olds occupied the middle building. The third, original structure, was used primarily for Lochlain’s boarding business.

The buzz of activity intensified as he approached. Most of the training was done for the day, had taken place during the cooler hours before sunrise. But there was still work to be done, and like clockwork, young Heidi Hastings stood in the shade of several gum trees, feeding an apple to her little filly, Anthem. Her father didn’t understand her fixation with the animal she’d sweet-talked him into buying, but Tyler suspected Heidi’s frequent presence at Lochlain had as much to do with a certain groom hovering nearby as it did her interest in horses.

“Afternoon,” he called as his three border collies bounded up to greet him. Carbine and Windbag were pushing ten, but they still thought they were as young as the pup, Tulloch.

Heidi glanced up with a smile so bloody sweet, Tyler winced. Her father was a good man, but Tyler didn’t know how any man could raise a kid alone, much less a young girl racing toward womanhood.

“I think something’s wrong,” she said, with worry both in her eyes and her voice. “She doesn’t want her apple.”

Tyler’s chest tightened. Bloody hell—after the girl’s mother abandoned them, Dylan Hastings had his hands more than full. “Just the heat,” Tyler said. The animals didn’t like it any more than the humans did. They needed rain—badly. But with rain would come lightning, and with the land as parched as a sponge in dry rot, lightning could mean disaster.

Just the week before, some bloke had tossed a cigarette out the car window, and before the sun had set, more than a hundred acres of bush had been scorched. Two national parks had been lost.

“Try this,” he added, pulling a couple of peppermints from his back pocket. He tossed them to her and winked. “Anthem just needs a treat is all.”

Heidi’s smile turned lopsided. “Thanks, I should have thought of that myself.”

“You will,” he promised in the best fatherly voice he could find. “Just give it—”

A blur of motion from the office complex snagged his attention. He squinted against the glare, bringing his office manager, Peggy, into view. She hurried toward him— something she rarely did. In her midfifties, she was an air-conditioning kind of woman.

“—time,” he finished, pulling Midnight Magic to a stop. He swung his leg over the horse and handed the reins to one of the young grooms—Zach, Heidi’s so-called “friend.” “Cool him off,” he instructed, already striding toward Peggy.

“Mr. Preston,” she called as she always did, refusing to call him Tyler, as he’d asked her to a million or so times. She was a stickler for formality, a master at organization, and somehow kept the administrative side of the business running smoothly. “Your one o’clock is here.”

Tyler glanced toward the parking area, where a shiny white convertible sat in the closest space. Looked as though he’d have to talk napkins after all.

“On my way,” he said, veering toward the office building’s shaded entrance. The first stones had been laid six years before, but the facility had only been completed the previous winter.

“But aren’t you—”

With Windbag trotting at his heels, Tyler stopped and pivoted, felt his mouth curve at the look of horror on Peggy’s face. She was old enough to be his mother— barely—but she almost never questioned him. And never, ever corrected him.

“Yes?” he prodded, trying not to laugh.

She bit down on her lip. “Nothing. I just thought… well, she’s a pretty thing. I thought maybe you’d want to clean up first.”

Now he did laugh. Loudly. A pretty thing. It figured. His mother, his new sister-in-law, his office manager…even Daniel’s American wife. It seemed the women of Lochlain and the surrounding area had a bloody intense case of matchmaking fever.

“Freshen up?” Without cracking a smile, he glanced down at the damp white cotton pressed against his skin, his dusty jeans and mud-caked boots, then shot the dog a grin. “What? She thinks I might run the party planner off?”

Peggy had the good grace to flush. “Of course not… I just thought…”

“Right-oh,” he said, adjusting the bush hat that had seen rain and heat and far better days. He knew what Peggy thought…what they all thought. Thirty-four years old was well and past time for the Preston heir to settle down.

“No worries,” he deadpanned with a quick rub of the old dog’s head. “I’m sure Miss—” He slipped off his sunglasses, but couldn’t come up with Andrew’s campaign manager’s name. “I’m late enough as it is. I’m sure she’d rather get this over with than wait for me to shower.”

Peggy sighed. “You make it sound like torture.”

She knew him well. He wasn’t a party kind of guy. He didn’t do galas and benefits. He didn’t do tuxedos or cologne. He only knew a Shiraz from a Chardonnay because his mother, daughter of a local vintner, had drilled it into her boys.

With his best trust-me smile, Tyler sent the dog off to play and strode toward the office.

Air-conditioning blasted him the second he walked inside. The scent of vanilla and sandalwood came next, courtesy of the cluster of candles Peggy kept on her desk. Just because she worked at a stable didn’t mean she had to smell hay and manure all day, she insisted.

It was a modest building by comparison to the nearby Fairchild Acres, but with four offices, a file room, a video room and adjacent meeting room, plus a small lunchroom, the facility suited him. He’d left the decor to Peggy, who’d chosen the same dark woods and rustic furniture found in the main house a couple of hundred meters away.

With the thud of his boots against the hardwood floor drowning out the soft, new age music Peggy said created ambience, Tyler covered the distance to his office and pushed through the partially open door. He had less than twenty minutes to give her. Andrew had departed Sydney a little before noon. He’d return to the stud soon. They had business to discuss. Andrew needed to know about the recent threats. Any talk of the party—

She had her back to him, but the gruff words Tyler had been about to offer stuck in his throat anyway. She stood there so unnaturally still, her posture boarding-school perfect, pale blond hair fastened behind her head in some sleek, elegant twist. A tidy cream suit hugged her willowy frame much too tightly considering the heat that baked the valley. She had to be burning…

The scent slammed into him on a soft wave of air-conditioning, the unmistakable whisper of baby powder and roses—and everything inside of Tyler tightened.

Familiarity came hard and fast, followed by a sharp twist of denial. There was nothing unique about baby powder and roses. He knew that. It was a common scent, pleasant even. Soft.

There’d been nothing soft about her.

Tara Moore had been like an explosion of danger and mystery and temptation, as far removed from the cool sip of Chardonnay standing across from him as cyclone season was from drought. But he stood there anyway, unmoving, barely breathing…and watched her.

As he’d done so many other times, in so many other places, when he’d damn near choked on something as benign as roses. And powder.

Andrew’s campaign manager had a picture in her hand. It was one of the early ones, its black-and-white image faded by time and sun. He knew that from where she stood, toward the left of the crowd of photographs and yellowed newspaper articles, blue ribbons and trophies, certificates. Those photos were from Lochlain’s adolescence, when his father had worked sunup to long after sundown to carve out a place for himself in Australia. To prove that he was every bit as worthy as the older brother he’d left behind in America.

Those pictures were from when Tyler and his brother, Shane, had been adolescents, as well. When Tyler had raced out of bed before first light, while Shane had often lingered at the house.

Those pictures—the one she held in her fine-boned hand—were of the time when a big beautiful foal had first come to Lochlain, and Tyler had named him Lightning’s Match, telling his father that only lightning could beat the big bay colt with the proud stance and white blaze.

It had been the beginning of a legacy, a legacy Tyler had worked to build and fortify for more than twenty-five years.

A legacy whose near destruction Tyler thought of every time he smelled baby powder and roses.

Slowly Andrew’s campaign manager turned, and something inside Tyler just…stopped.

Chapter Two

Those eyes. Goddamn, he knew those eyes, wide and blue and so full of temptation they should have been illegal. But there was no temptation in them now, only a cool, distant refinement that sliced like a chilled knife.

“Tyler,” she said, and her voice was different, too, no longer laughing and daring, infectious, but strong and graceful, as bloody elegant as the rest of her. “It’s been a long time.”

What have they done to you? That was the first question that fired through him. What had her father done to her? What had England done? Oxford?

Where the hell was…Tara?

But just as quickly those questions fractured into the only truth that mattered.

The seventeen-year-old with the ultrastraight, ultra-blond hair and low-rise jeans, with the trio of hoop earrings and the galloping filly tattooed at the base of her back…no longer existed.

Bloody hell, she’d never existed at all.

She’d simply been an illusion.

A lie.

Through the quiet, Peggy’s Celtic music gained tempo, a flute and a drum merging into a staccato rhythm. He’d been about to swipe off his hat. He’d been about to stroll into the room as big as Australia, covered in dust and full of excuses, and charm his way out of discussing the merits of hors d’oeuvres until Andrew arrived.

But now he lounged in the doorway, and watched.

And something entirely different streamed through him.

“Tara.” That was the name she’d given him, the name he’d whispered as she’d twisted beneath him and he’d twined his fingers with hers as his thoughts had drifted to the future.

It was a damn odd time to smile, but his lips curved anyway, slowly, with deceptive languor. “Oops,” he said with all the remorse of a nine-year-old caught with his hand in his grandma’s cookie jar. “My bad.”

Her eyes—impossibly, ridiculously blue—darkened. She stepped toward him, photo still in hand, but before she could so much as breathe, he rolled right on.

“It’s Darci, isn’t it, sunshine?” The endearment, first drawled that long-ago night when she’d sauntered up to him with mischief gleaming in her eyes, sliced deep. “Darci Parnell.” Daughter of Weston Parnell, currently serving as Australia’s ambassador to Britain. At the time, six years before, he’d been serving his second term as president of the International Thoroughbred Racing Federation—the role Tyler’s cousin Andrew now sought to claim.

Back then, when Darci had claimed to be twenty-three-year-old Tara Moore, Weston Parnell had been one of the most influential men in the Australian racing community.

Hell, in the entire country.

Darci had been seventeen. Seven-bloody-hell-teen. Tyler had been twenty-eight.

Preston Heir Robs The Cradle

He still had that newspaper, not framed and displayed like the ones chronicling Lightning’s Match and the growth of Lochlain, but tucked inside the bottom left drawer of his desk next to a foreclosure notice, as a reminder of just how steep a price carelessness could demand.

“I know this must come as a surprise,” she said in that thick, cultured voice, the one that curled through him, even now. “But I thought it best—”

“You thought it best.” He pushed from the wall and strolled closer, enjoying the way she tried to back up, but had nowhere to go. Except into the Preston-fortified bookcase. “You have a habit of that now, don’t you, sunshine?”

Color touched her cheeks, not enough to be called a blush, but a flush, much like the night he’d looked down at her through the flickering light of a candle, and seen a soft glow to her cheeks.

And her chest.

Now her chin came up. “I knew you wouldn’t be happy—”

“But why let something insignificant like that stop you, right?”

“I believe in Andrew,” she said, and for the first time, fire flared in her eyes, not the recklessness of before, but something harder and deeper, wounded almost.

Tyler just barely bit back the growl that formed in his throat.

There was nothing wounded about Darci Parnell.

“He wants to make a difference,” she said. “He’s the only one who can. If Jacko gets elected—”

“Jacko is your father’s friend,” Tyler reminded her, but the obvious did not need to be pointed out. They both knew of the relationship between Weston and Jackson Bullock. With several newspapers and television stations fortifying his portfolio, Jackson had been more than happy to help his mate squash the bug who’d dared to put his hands on Weston’s precious little girl.

The memory—the truth of it all—flashed in Darci’s eyes. “And he’s done enough, wouldn’t you say?” Her voice was quieter now, almost sad. “It’s time for fresh blood and new ideas, and that’s what Andrew represents. But he’s got an uphill battle in Jacko’s backyard. That’s why this party at Lochlain is so important. That’s why I didn’t use my name in our correspondence—”

Why she hadn’t called, hadn’t let him hear her voice. Even with the change, even with all that elegance and breeding, he would have known.

Tyler didn’t need a mirror to know that the truth of it all burned in the dark green of his eyes. “Some things never change, do they, sunshine? You still color the truth to fit all nice and tidy into your pretty little world.”

She winced. “Think what you will of me,” she said, and her voice was stronger now. “But I’m standing here, aren’t I?”

Yes, she was. She was standing in a sliver of sunlight, right in front of the family bookcase as if she had every right to be there. He took the last three steps that separated them and did what he’d been telling himself not to do. He lifted a hand toward the side of her face, and touched.

He wasn’t sure what he expected…wanted. For her to turn away, twist away. Lift a hand to his wrist and yank it from her face. Tell him to go to hell.

For her to step into him, lift her own hand to his face, push up toward him, tell him that she was sorry…

She lifted her eyes to his, but made no move to step away, no move to break contact. The new age music had faded to a low, soft chant, leaving only the sound of their breaths and the burn of the heat.

“You’ve done well,” she said quietly, and he felt himself stiffen as if she’d used her hands on him, rather than just her voice. “That’s all I ever wanted for you.”

The words fell into silence for a long, slow heartbeat until the soft music shifted to a new song, this one with a shrill feminine wail.

He jerked back, broke every sliver of contact, but bloody hell, even as he let indifference fall around him, he couldn’t help but wonder if any of Tara still existed beneath that trim-fitting suit, where he’d once run his mouth down the curve of her back to the little filly—

“Peggy will get what you need,” he said roughly, as a mobile phone started to ring. Not his. He hated the things, rarely carried one, certainly not one that played Irish rock music as a ring tone. He turned, refusing to look at her one second longer. To let himself wonder.

He strode toward the partially open door as the phone rang again, and again, the old braided rug muting the sound of his boots. It had been one of his father’s first purchases after moving to Australia. He’d hung on to it all this time, a reminder of what it was like to start with nothing. True, he’d had his name and a sizable trust fund, but back then David Preston had not had the one thing that had mattered to him.

“Ty.”

The quiet voice slipped across the office and the years. Time moved forward. Tyler knew that. To get where he was going, a man had to keep his eye on the destination.

But he also knew the value of looking back. Of remembering—of never letting himself forget where he’d been.

It was the only way to make sure he never went there again.

Slowly he stopped, and slowly he turned. And this time he was prepared. He was prepared for the sight of her standing there, the sight of Darci Parnell in her chic little suit, holding the picture of him in her hands, the picture he’d caught her looking at when he’d first walked into his office, of him sitting atop Lightning’s Match, when the gum trees his father had planted had been too young to give off shade. He’d been wearing a bush hat even back then, and against the glare of the summer sun, he’d squinted at the camera.

“I’m sorry about the mess with Sam,” she said, looking up from the photo to the man. She hadn’t answered her phone. “I know you didn’t do anything wrong.”

But someone didn’t. Someone thought he’d drugged Sam Whittleson’s horse. And someone wanted to make him pay.

“Lightning Chaser is an amazing horse,” she added. “I’m looking forward to the Classic.”

One side of his mouth lifted. With More Than All That sidelined, the field was wide open, and rumors were running rampant that a filly who rarely ran with the boys might give the race a try. A filly owned by none other than the former owner of Warrego Downs…Weston Parnell.

A filly named Darci’s Pride.

Somehow, Tyler thought it fit.

“Well then,” he said, “that makes two of us, sunshine.” Her smile was brief, fleeting, politely formal.

“I’m looking forward to seeing what Darci’s Pride is made of,” he added with a wicked surge of adrenaline. “See if she’s all that she’s made out to be.”

Darci’s chin came up. “She is.”

He shouldn’t have winked. Tyler knew that. But damn it all to hell, he did.

Habit, he told himself. It was just a bloody habit. “I prefer to be my own judge.”

Her smile widened, reminding him for one cruel moment of that girl he’d seen—

He broke the thought, the memory. “I’ll send Peggy in,” he said, and then he was gone, didn’t trust himself to linger, to look, for one second longer. It was well and fine to glance back…but only a glance.

She watched him go. She stood there in his large, Spartan office, not trusting herself to move, barely trusting herself to breathe, and watched Tyler Preston walk out the door.

Again.

She should have been prepared.

The last time, she’d been naked, clutching only a sheet. But somehow, through the years and the miles, the distance she’d injected between them, she’d forgotten. She’d forgotten what it was like to be in the same room as Tyler Preston, to feel the gleam in those dark green eyes, to see how his mouth could curve into those naughty, wicked smiles, smiles that had the simultaneous power to seduce and destroy. She’d forgotten how his voice, that low, irreverent Aussie drawl, could swim through her and touch places she hadn’t been touched in six long years.

She’d forgotten, because she’d had to.

She’d forgotten, because remembering would have made walking away, moving forward, impossible.

And if there was one thing Darci was determined to do, it was move forward. There’d been no future for her in Australia all those years ago, a seventeen-year-old whose face had been splashed on the cover of every tabloid. Everywhere she’d gone, people had looked at her. They’d stared—and they’d known. She was the girl who’d seduced the man, the jailbait who’d gone to bed with the cowboy.

The harlot who’d smeared the reputation of one of Australia’s favorite sons.

The shame had followed her everywhere, until finally she’d stepped onto the big jet that hot March afternoon, and never looked back. England, Oxford, had been a world away, and with the miles and the years, she’d moved forward.

But then she’d run into Andrew Preston at a party in London, and all those hard broken edges she’d pushed deep had shoved their way forward, and she’d known. Finally, after six years, she’d realized how to fix things. How to make things better, to give Tyler back all that she’d taken from him.

That’s what she wanted. To give Tyler back the respectability her recklessness had cost him, to prove to him and her father and everyone who still saw her as frivolous that she was no longer that reckless, irresponsible child. That she was competent, could be trusted. That she was no longer that motherless girl spinning so desperately, horribly out of control. Then she would be free of the past. Then she would walk away, walk forward. Finally, at last, get on with her life.

She’d planned and she’d analyzed, just as she’d learned to do at Oxford. She’d struck up a conversation with Andrew and the two had quickly realized how much they had in common. It had been easy between them. He hadn’t recognized her name, hadn’t recognized her as the girl who’d almost destroyed his cousin.

The invitation to join his campaign had been natural, easy. He needed help in Australia. She was Australian. Her father had served two terms as president of the ITRF. Despite her six-year exile, she knew people. She had friends, influence. She could help Andrew as no one else could. She could help him gain Australian support, despite the popularity of Jacko Bullock.

The opportunity had been all but gift wrapped, the kind of chance she’d been craving since earning her degree in commerce and political science.

She’d wanted to say yes, absolutely, to shout it from the rooftop of her London flat. But she’d realized she couldn’t, not until she’d told Andrew the truth about her and his cousin. She’d learned the consequences of lies, even seemingly harmless little white ones. So she’d talked to Andrew and held her breath, and after a long, unsteady heartbeat, he’d smiled warmly and held out his hand, told her the past was the past.

But then Tyler strode into his office, tall and dusty, damp from his land, in need of a shave and with that battered hat pulled down low on his head, and something inside her, all that determination and resolve maybe, the nice little speech she’d rehearsed, had simply shattered.

The years had been kind to him. Amazing, actually. He was still lanky, but no longer in the way of the brash cowboy half the country had been in love with. He was a man now, with all the confidence and awareness that came with the years. Even the gleam in his eyes was different, still bloody irreverent, but more focused now.

Dangerous.

And in the moment she’d first seen him standing there, she’d realized how wrong she’d been. How badly she’d misjudged the situation. All that she’d forgotten, all she’d refused to remember, had surged back, tightening around her like a shiny new vise.

One glance at the picture in her hands, of Tyler so long ago, and the ache in her chest deepened. He’d been young then, innocent in the way only a child could be. But even then, when he could have been no more than eight or nine, the grit had been in his eyes, the dreams and the determination to make them come true. And the hat…

She smiled at the sight of it sitting crookedly on his head, much like a similar hat he’d worn when she’d first seen him all those years ago. She’d been bored, flipping channels on her television, when she’d landed on a local access cable station, and seen him. She hadn’t known the horseman’s name, had only seen the naughty gleam in his eyes, heard the irreverent drawl, and from that moment forward, she’d been hooked. She’d made it her mission—

Her mission. It always had a way of getting her in trouble.

She set the picture back on the shelf and fished around in the leather satchel that doubled as a briefcase, locating her mobile phone. She pushed the button to see the missed call, braced herself even before her father’s name appeared.

He’d been trying to reach her for several days.

Sighing, she jabbed a few buttons and brought the phone to her ear: “Sweetheart, I do wish you would answer your phone. I have decided to fly into Sydney a few days in advance of the Summit.”

Darci closed her eyes and let out a slow breath. It was one thing to avoid her father with an ocean between them, something entirely different when he was only two hours south. “We can have lunch,” he said in his booming formal voice, the one he always used. The only one, Darci had learned, he knew how to use, even when she’d been a young girl who’d needed something so…different. “I will be at the Observatory, as usual. Barbara will set something up.”

She wanted to resent him for that, and maybe once, she had. Most fathers didn’t need an assistant to arrange time with their children.

But Weston Parnell was hardly most fathers, and he never had been, even before, when her mother had been there to soften him.

“I need you to think about what we discussed last week,” he said, as he had in every message he’d left her over the past four days, since she’d boarded the plane at Heathrow. He’d actually insisted on driving her there, but in the end, she realized he’d only driven her there to try and talk her out of leaving. “Now is not the time to get involved with the Prestons.”

They were an upstanding family, but he made them sound like pariahs, something dangerous to be viewed with mild curiosity, but only from a safe distance.

“Not even Andrew. I am hearing things—”

She stiffened. That was new.

“I know you think you have something to prove, Darci-Anne, but aligning yourself with that family at this point in time is not the way.”

The chill down her spine was immediate. It almost sounded as though her father was warning her.

Through the window, she saw Tyler squatting next to two black-and-white dogs in the shade of one of the old gum trees, his attention on a young girl with a high ponytail. They were laughing.

“Please be careful,” her father concluded. “Please think about all that I have advised you.”

His words fell silent then, leaving only the haunting thrum of the music piped through the office.

“Miss Parnell?”

Hiding her unease, Darci turned toward the tidy woman with the surprisingly long gray braid standing in the doorway.

“If you’ll follow me,” the woman who’d introduced herself as Peggy said. “Mr. Preston requested that we use the conference room.”

The quick blade of disappointment shouldn’t have surprised her—she didn’t belong in Tyler Preston’s office any more than she belonged in his life.

“I take it you’ve increased security?”

Staring out the window, Tyler threw back the last of his Scotch. Night had long since fallen. Deep in the shire, over thirty kilometers from Pepper Flats, the nearest town, darkness swallowed the land. But he could still see her, damn it. Still see Darci walking with his cousin to her shiny little sports car. Andrew had pressed a hand against the small of her back. He’d opened the door for her. Before she’d disappeared inside, she’d turned toward him and slipped off her sunglasses, beamed a smile up at him. He’d smiled back at her, warmly.

Intimately.

“Around the clock,” he said, turning from the memory and toward the man. Darci had gone, butAndrew had stayed. “Called a private security firm this afternoon. They’ll have someone here in the morning.” Maybe it was an extreme step, but Tyler wasn’t taking chances. “Until then, the grooms are taking turns staying awake, just in case.”

Leaning forward in one of two leather wing chairs, Andrew frowned. The two had grown up a world apart, but with the same height and short dark hair, they could easily pass as brothers.

The Irish blood of their paternal grandfather ran strong like that.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think someone was targeting the family,” he said.

Tyler pushed from the window and strode toward the small table where the whiskey bottle sat. He rarely had more than one glass, but tonight he was pressing for his third. “Not the family,” he said, offering the bottle to his cousin.

Andrew tossed back the rest of his glass and extended it toward Tyler.

“It’s bigger than that,” Tyler said, pouring. “Corruption is everywhere, and the Internet is only making it easier. The syndicate sees money to be made.”

And they didn’t give a damn who fell in the process

Andrew’s gaze turned speculative. “Darci thinks…”

His cousin kept talking, but his words barely registered. Darci says. Darci thinks. Darci believes. It had been that way all evening. No matter where the conversation turned, it always twisted back to Darci Parnell.

And even a deaf man could have heard the admiration in Andrew’s voice.

“I’m so damned lucky to have her,” he said, and Tyler refused to let his fingers tighten against the glass. “She’s really giving me her all.”

Tyler bit back the hard sound that wanted to break from his throat. “She’s a go-getter,” he drawled. “Always known how to get exactly what she wants.”

Andrew stiffened, swore softly. “Christ, will you listen to me? I’m sorry, man. I wasn’t thinking. She told me about you two.” He stood, spread out his hands. “If having her around is a problem—”

“No problem at all,” Tyler assured. “You won’t find anyone who can do for you what she can.”

Somehow he didn’t choke on the words, and the image they immediately evoked, of Darci smiling as she pushed up on her toes and curved her arms around Tyler’s neck…

Andrew didn’t look convinced. “I’m not here to—”

Tyler lifted his hand. “It’s all good, mate. Darci is good, the fund-raiser is good…your campaign is good.”

The blue in Andrew’s eyes darkened, but he said nothing. They looked like brothers, but they weren’t. They were cousins. An ocean had separated them most of their lives. They knew how to talk horses and campaigns, but that’s where it stopped.

Hell, even Shane didn’t bring up Darci Parnell.

But long after Tyler had gone upstairs, long after the big stone house had gone quiet, the scent of rose and powder overrode that of leather and sandalwood.

He should have slept. Sunrise would come whether he wanted it to or not, and with it a full day of training and finalizing security for LC. But sleep eluded him. He tried reading. He tried some of Peggy’s new age music. He tried another drink.

But the restlessness kept right on surging.

Shortly after one o’clock he turned out the lamp and resigned himself to counting wallabies.

He’d reached fifteen before the bullhorn broke the silence. He was on his feet before the red glow coming from his window registered. For one sickening second everything slowed, blurred—the shouting, the glow that turned into flames, the acrid intrusion of smoke.

The frantic scream of horses.

But just as quickly adrenaline punched through the haze and he was yanking on his jeans and his boots, grabbing a shirt as he lunged for the door.

Chapter Three

This was when he woke.

This was when he always, always pulled himself awake.

When he ran toward the fire. When the orgy of flames streaked against the night sky and the smoke poured from the windows, when the alarm kept droning against the normally quiet night, when the horses cried. That’s when he made the nightmare end, when any horseman would sit up drenched in sweat, heart slamming and breathing hard, shoving aside the residue of the nightmare. Before. Before they ran into the barn. Before they smelled the stench of burning—

Tyler didn’t wake up. Because he wasn’t asleep. And the strobe light pulsing against the night sky from the barn complex was not a drill.

“Jesus, God,” Andrew shouted from two steps behind, but Tyler kept right on running. They’d prepared for this, trained for this.

But it was instinct that took over, instinct that drove him straight for the flames shooting from Barn B—and the fifty-eight two- and three-year-olds trapped inside.

His staff was already there, grooms and trainers and exercise riders fighting the fire and wrestling the terrified horses out one at a time. If one horse spooked—

“The far pasture!” Tyler barked as he passed head groom Charlie Moore. “Make sure someone stays with them!”

Grim-eyed, Charlie nodded, and ran.

Both men knew what would happen if the horses were not contained. They would try to return to the barn, their home. Where they felt safe.

It had happened before.

“Where’s Daniel?” he shouted above the pulse of the bullhorn.

“Inside!” Mac, another groom, answered. “He called 000, then went in!”

Tyler didn’t hesitate. The bush fire brigade was on the way, but there was no time to wait. Sucking in a sharp breath, he grabbed a flame-retardant blanket and ran into the darkness, veering left while Andrew went right. Flames greedily consumed the center section, where they kept the tack.

Trying not to inhale, he ran down the corridor until he found an occupied stall. Halters and lead ropes hung outside each, illuminated by glow-in-the-dark tape. Coughing, he lunged in and reached for the horse.

“Hey there, mate. No worries now,” he rasped, pretending everything was fine, that there was nothing to worry about. “How about a little nighttime walk?”

Whinnying, the colt shuffled deeper into the illusion of safety offered by his stall.

From the ceiling, flames curled downward. “Easy now,” Tyler choked out, and this time he used more force, draping the horse in the blanket and urging him from the stall.

The burning in his lungs demanded that he run, but Tyler kept his movements contained, measured. If the horse sensed his alarm—

On a fresh burst of adrenaline, he staggered into the night, tried to breathe. But it was smoke that he dragged into his lungs.

“I got him,” one of the young trainers said, falling into the assembly line evacuation plan they’d designed, but never thought to use. Only Tyler and Daniel and a few others were designated to be in the barn. That would keep the process as orderly as possible. Everyone had a place, a role. Rescue horses. Secure them. Fight the fire. If someone turned up missing—

Simultaneously Andrew and Daniel staggered from the cloud of smoke, each wrestling an antsy horse.

“Ty!” came an urgent voice, and then his brother, Shane, was there, running toward him. “I came as fast as I—”

“The pasture!” Tyler called. “Make sure none of the horses—”

A loud groan killed his words, followed by a long, tearing crack, then a crash somewhere inside the barn…and the panicked scream of a horse.

“No!” Charlie roared, but before Tyler found the groom, a thrashing Appaloosa broke from the direction of the pasture toward the barn. Charlie bolted after him. “Someone get him!”

Tyler started toward the horse, but Shane took off first, grabbing the horse’s lead as he reared up against the flames.

“Got him!” Shane cried, fighting to bring the panicked animal under control.

Tyler pivoted back to the barn where another trainer dragged two more horses into the marginally clearer air.

In the distance, the blare of the fire engines merged with the bullhorn. From the main road, the lights of several cars and trucks could be seen racing toward the ranch.

They’d never make it in time.

Running back inside, Tyler again veered left. That was his corridor of responsibility. Daniel had the right. When they ran their drills, he and Daniel blindfolded themselves to simulate the smoke and the darkness. But the absurdity of that ground through Tyler. There was no simulating the heat scorching through his clothes, or the acrid smoke choking off his breath. His body fought to breathe, but he pushed himself forward, toward the back of the barn where Lightning Chaser—

The fire roared, a living creature consuming the barn at a vicious pace. Coughing, Tyler dragged his damp shirt over his mouth and struggled to breathe…run.

But with another groan, the section of barn in front of him collapsed.

Tyler twisted into the side of a stall and out of the path of a burning beam.

“H-help!”

The cry barely registered over the hunger of the fire.

“S-some…one he-elp!”

Smoke stole visibility. Eyes burning, Tyler staggered into the stall and used his hands to find the side. There he could climb. On pure determination he made his way into the next stall and jumped to the hay below.

Hay. As a precaution, they stored it in another building, but there was enough in each barn to feed a fire into an allout inferno.

“Help!”

The voice was weaker now, but Tyler fought his way toward the far side of the corridor. “Who’s th-there?” he choked.

The sound that greeted him was not human, but equine. A big black shadow moved against the glow of the fire, gyrating frantically. “Easy.” Tyler coughed, reaching for the lead. “Easy now, boy.”

The horse reared away.

“Thank God,” rasped the voice he’d heard before, and through the suffocating darkness a hand closed weakly around Tyler’s ankle.

“Christ almighty,” he swore, dropping to his feet where he found the man. “What the hell—”

“B-broke away,” Reynard, one of Lochlain’s most recent hires, choked out. “Tried to get back to his stall.”

And knocked his rescuer down in the process. Reynard was lucky he hadn’t been trampled to death. “Come on,” Tyler said, easing the older man to his feet. “We gotta get you—”

“Preston!”With the new voice came the hard rush of water and Tyler knew the brigade had arrived. The flames devouring the beam that had blocked the corridor hissed against water as three uniformed firefighters surged toward them.

“Here!” Tyler shouted, handing off Reynard. Pivoting, he ran for the spooked Thoroughbred, finding a saddle blanket to cover the animal’s eyes.

“Got him,” called one of the men, reaching for the lead. Tyler released the horse, turned back to the far end of the barn.

“Preston! You gotta get out of here!” the firefighter called. “The whole place is about to come down!”

But Tyler was already lunging toward Lightning Chaser’s stall. He had to be sure. He had to check.

Staggering, he veered into the stall and, eyes burning, saw through the sickening red glow. The horse that had grazed so quietly just that afternoon, the champion Thoroughbred who’d run a breathtaking last leg of the Queensland Stakes. He fought against the back corner of the stall he equated with safety, literally trying to climb the wall.

The shadowy sight hit Tyler like a punch to the gut.

“Easy, mate,” he tried to drawl, speaking to the animal as a parent would speak to a child. But his voice was a choked rasp. Fumbling for a blanket, he grabbed the halter and lead and moved forward. “Howzabouta l-little midnight—” His throat burned. His lungs screamed.

His vision blurred.

He’d been in too long. He knew that. He’d done the research, consulted with the fire brigade. They’d run the drills. He knew how long he had, how long he could be inside before the smoke overcame him and he became useless.

But he pushed forward anyway. From his first days of training, Lightning Chaser had given Tyler his all. Just like his grandsire had, all those years ago. A Thoroughbred down to his hooves, the horse never said no. He never protested. He trained and he performed.

And now he was in trouble.

Tyler could no more abandon him than he could have left his father or brother.

Staggering, he reached for his horse even as one of the firefighters reached for him. Then something was thrust against his face and he was choking again, harder, not from the smoke but the rush of oxygen. He gulped greedily, taking what he needed to ease Lightning Chaser from his stall.

The animal’s guttural cry sickened him. He put his hands to the colt’s back and tried to reassure him, get him to quiet. Quickly he affixed the lead then ripped off his overshirt and pulled it over the animal’s eyes. Then, in tandem with the firefighter, they led Lightning from his stall and down the corridor.

Through the darkness Daniel appeared. And Andrew. His trainer took the horse. His cousin took him. Coughing, they burst from the building and into the night.

It was all Tyler could do not to go to his knees.

But this was his barn, his stable. These were his men. And they looked to him for leadership. Direction.

Assurance.

He could not go to his knees in front of them.

Hands then, lots of them. Reaching for Tyler. Pulling him farther from the inferno. Shouts.

An oxygen mixture pressed to his face.

He sucked it in as greedily as before, trying to orient himself. Around him, everything blurred, slowed. The strobe light still flashed in obscene synchronicity with the lights on the fire engines. The bullhorn still pulsed rhythmically. He could see his men, all of them doing what they’d been trained to do. And Christ, he could see the other barn then, Barn A, the original structure—the one used for boarding.

Up in flames.

All those horses…some of them weren’t young, weren’t in the same top-notch condition as the Thoroughbreds. Some of them were older, slower.

One was blind.

Anthem…

“Here,” someone said, and he blinked to see a young man with soot-smeared cheeks thrust a glass of water into his hands.A towel then, damp, cool, against his face. He blinked and tried to bring the kid into focus, could make out little more than a scrawny frame and an old, torn bush hat.

“Thanks,” he said, or tried to say, but wasn’t sure the words made it past the rawness of his throat.

“D-Daniel—” But before he could locate his trainer, Peggy was there, with her long gray hair loose around her face, wearing what Tyler would swear was only a nightgown. She lifted her hands as if to inspect him.

“Don’t you ever do that again!” she scolded, and then she started to cry. Peggy. Stalwart, unflappable Peggy, started to cry. “Going into that inferno like that!”

“Easy now,” he choked, but every time he opened his mouth, air rushed the back of his throat, and he coughed abrasively.

“Don’t talk,” she said as one of the paramedics—Pete Rutherford, he thought—kneeled in front of him and started to check him over.

“I have everything under control,” she announced, tears over, and magically, with the same efficiency she did everything, she produced the laminated checklist they’d designed for emergencies. “I’ve called your parents,” she said as old Windbag materialized at his feet, panting frantically. “And Russ.” She glanced toward the shadows milling nervously in the far pasture. “He’s already here.”

Russ Chaplain was their head veterinarian.

“Have we…” Tyler coughed as Peggy shot him a look of reprimand. “The horses,” he got out with a hand to the dog’s back. “Have we lost—”

“Too soon to tell.” That was Daniel. With the whites of his eyes glowing against a face covered in ash and maybe a smear of blood, he crouched in front of Tyler. Andrew and Shane flanked him. Daniel started to speak, but when he coughed instead, Shane took over.

“As best as we can tell, all barns are empty,” Tyler’s brother said, and relief rushed in like oxygen. “We’ve evacuated Barn C as a precaution.” Shane was not a horseman, never had been. He’d chosen the family’s other business, a vineyard elsewhere in the Valley. But in that moment, with the hat pulled low over his head and the ferocity in his eyes, he looked as though he lived and breathed the land every bit as much as Tyler did. “The horses are in the pasture. They’re secure. We’re trying to count them, but…”

The words trailed off, didn’t need to be said.

Not all animals were accounted for.

“Light…ning?” He could still see the animal frantically pawing the back of his stall.

God, even over the shouting and the sirens, the fire and the water, he could still hear him….

His brother and Daniel exchanged a tense look. “Russ is with him,” Shane said. “He took in a lot of smoke.”

Tyler’s eyes burned. Lightning Chaser was a fighter, Tyler knew that. If any horse could survive—

Survive. That was the best they could hope for. For Lightning Chaser to survive.

But already Tyler knew his champion Thoroughbred, the big strong bay colt who loved nothing more than to run, would never race again.

“The brigade is wetting down the surrounding area as a precaution,” Shane explained, but the words barely registered. Tyler stared dry-eyed at the gnarled flames devouring two of his barns, and felt the sickness churn in his gut. Just that afternoon—

He could still see young Heidi sitting in the shade of a now scorched gum tree, with an apple in her hand.

Acutely aware of his brother and cousin, he straightened his shoulders and stood, noticed the young groom standing with the other two dogs. The kid was covered in smoke, had rips in his baggy, long-sleeved plaid shirt and something that looked like blood on the side of his face. But his eyes…it was his eyes that got Tyler, the horrified, haunted glow of shock.

No one would walk away from this unscathed.

“Preston,” said a quiet, intense voice over the wail of the fire engines. Tyler turned, saw Detective Sergeant Dylan Hastings of the Pepper Flats station striding toward him, not in his normal attire of jeans and a button-down, but the protective gear of a volunteer firefighter.And in that instant the voice clicked and Tyler realized who had followed him to Lightning Chaser’s stall and pressed the breathing apparatus to his face. “Pete here tells me you’re going to be okay.”

Tyler stuck out his hand. “Thanks to…” he started, but another spasm stole his words. He cleared his throat, tried again. “Thanks to you, mate.”

Hastings’s eyes were hard, flat. “Just doing my job.”

That’s all he ever said. Tyler had been teaching young Heidi the ins and outs of riding for almost a year, but her father still treated Tyler with a formality typically reserved for strangers.

Heidi.

He glanced toward the remains of Barn A. A smaller building, the fire there had already been put out. “A-Anthem?”

Hastings shook his head. “Don’t know yet,” he said grimly, as Tyler again noticed the groom in the bush hat hovering nearby. “I’m needed back over there, but before morning we’ll need a full accounting of what happened here tonight.”

A rough sound broke from Tyler’s throat. He turned toward the inferno that had once housed his Thoroughbreds, his entire stable of two- and three-year-olds, surrounded now by the fire brigade. Hoses shot water against flames that didn’t seem to give a bloody damn.

“The note,” Tyler muttered, and Dylan’s eyes met his. The two had talked earlier in the day, when Tyler had called to report the threat against Lightning Chaser. “GodAlmighty.”

Dawn brought an otherworldly glow to the eastern horizon.

“We’re lucky,” David Preston insisted. He had been the one who had first walked the rolling hills of the northern Hunter Valley that had become Lochlain, who’d struck out from America almost forty years before, who’d used his inheritance to found the dynasty denied to him in America.

He and Tyler’s mother had arrived from Sydney just as the main fire had been brought under control, less than two hours after Peggy had called them. The horror of what he’d found burned in his hooded, dark green eyes.

“That’s what we have to focus on,” he insisted, standing with his two sons outside the corral where the horses milled. They were quieter now that the strobe light had been turned off and the bullhorn had fallen silent.

Quieter after the fire went dark, and the remains of the stables had fallen.

“We can rebuild,” David said in the same strong, stoic voice Tyler remembered from his childhood, when Tyler had found his father kneeling in the soft hazy light of sunrise, next to a mare and a foal who’d both been lost in childbirth.

It was the same voice David had used six years before, when Tyler had gotten caught with his pants down, literally, and almost lost Lochlain.

Tyler looked at him now, at his father, strong and robust even in his late fifties, at the lines carved into his weathered, rancher’s face, the tight lines of his mouth and the devastation he couldn’t quite hide, and quietly vowed to make sure David Preston never had to see Lochlain in ruin again.

“You’re alive,” father said to son, and Tyler felt his chest tighten. He should say something. He knew that. But that would mean letting go of the tight rope he’d been holding since staggering from the barn with Lightning Chaser. And once he let go…

“No one was seriously hurt,” David went on. Cuts and bruises, a groom with a broken wrist, another—the new handyman Reynard, who’d fought to control the panicked horse after a beam had fallen—diagnosed with fractured ribs. “That’s what we have to focus on.”

But the same could not be said of the horses. Three had yet to be found. Two had been put down shortly before sunrise, one due to a shattered right front femur, the second to intense smoke inhalation. The others…

“Lightning will recover,” David Preston said, tapping into his son’s thoughts just as he always did.

“You saved his life,” Shane added, but the trace of hero worship in his younger brother’s voice, something Tyler had not heard since they were kids, scraped.

He glanced from the smoldering remains, where the fire brigade still battled hot spots, toward the horses on the other side of the soot-smeared white fence: the big bays and chestnuts; the shiny black two-year-old who’d run his first race only the week before; the Appaloosa who started each race like a streak; and the little filly who’d never even gotten a chance to show her stuff. Her maiden race was still two weeks away.

“They’re goddamn bloody innocent,” he finally said, and even now, hours after he’d emerged for the last time from the burning barn and sucked in fresh oxygen, each word seared against his throat. “They didn’t deserve this.”

But his father misunderstood. “Son,” David said, and with the quiet word, put a hand to Tyler’s shoulder. “Don’t.”

Tyler’s throat tightened. He turned to meet his father’s gaze, felt something hot and salty sting his.

“This is not your fault,” David insisted. “You did everything right here. You don’t store hay in the horse barns. Smoking isn’t allowed. The wiring is new…hell, Peggy says it passed inspection just two months ago. There’s no bloody way—”

Tyler’s eyes must have flashed. He felt the streak of fury, saw the confused look that passed between his father and his brother.

“Someone did this,” Tyler said, pulling the crumpled note from his pocket and pressing it into his father’s hands. “Someone wanted to hurt him.” Hurt Lightning Chaser. To punish him. Punish them all. “Because of the Queensland,” he gritted out. Because More Than All That had been disqualified, and Lightning had taken home the purse.

Shane moved beside his father, and together they stared down at the thick words scrawled against the picture of Lightning Chaser in full, magnificent stride.

It was a long moment before they looked up. “You think it was arson,” David said.

The words were hard, incredulous, and Tyler felt his jaw tighten in response. He glanced back toward the horses, automatically searching for young Heidi’s horse, Anthem. He’d yet to account for the filly. “I know it was.”

“I’m on my way now. My plane leaves Louisville first thing in the morning.”

Phone in hand, Tyler strode across the muddied paddock toward the small brick building that housed Lochlain’s medical facilities. They were equipped for routine maintenance and injuries—not triage. But each horse needed to be evaluated before individual arrangements could be made. Neighbors from throughout the shire had been arriving in a steady stream since long before the blaze had been put out. They had their trailers. At their stud farms, they had barns. They wanted to help. Fairchild Acres was the only stud that hadn’t sent assistance, and yet even Louisa’s head trainer had phoned to express his horror.

Tyler was quite sure Louisa had not authorized the call. She made no secret of her disdain for the Prestons, whom she still considered nothing more than newcomers.

“There’s really no need, mate,” Tyler told his former trainer, Marcus Vasquez. “Your hands, they’re full with Lucas Racing.” Marcus had relocated to America the year before and was working to establish his own stable.

Half a world away, Tyler wasn’t sure how Marcus had already found out about the fire.

“I was there when Lightning was born,” he reminded. “We were both there that first morning he—” His voice thickened, bringing with it the faintest trace of his Spanish heritage. “I was there,” he finished abruptly, and in truth that said it all. He’d been a hell of a lot more than just Lightning Chaser’s trainer. “And I need to be there now.”

Tyler understood.

He ended the call and kept walking, turned off his phone. There’d been enough calls. Enough questions.

Too bloody few answers.

“The insurance investigator rang,” Peggy said, as he passed. “She’ll be here within the hour.”

He nodded, kept walking. He’d met Beverly Morgan a time or two in the past. She was fair, but she took no prisoners. She would have her own set of questions.

And she would not appreciate his lack of answers.

Over four hours had passed since the fire had been put out, but the heat kept boiling. Tyler’s watch said it wasn’t yet ten, but the morning sun scorched like midafternoon. With every breath, the stench of smoke burned, and everywhere he looked he saw the lingering smear of smoke.

Even when he closed his eyes.

God, especially when he closed his eyes.

He’d yet to go inside. His mother had tried to get him to shower and clean up, to eat something. To have some tea. She meant well, he knew that. She wanted to help. But she hadn’t understood that he couldn’t. If he put so much as one bite of food in his mouth—

His stomach roiled at the thought.

Tyler rounded the corner and slipped in the back door. From the front of the brightly lit facility he heard Russ’s voice in a serious conversation with one of the three additional veterinarians who’d arrived with the sunrise.

But it was the soft voice from the stall to the right that stopped him. Low, sad…oddly reassuring.

He moved closer and looked, saw the boy. Scrawny, covered in soot with a bloodstain on his torn shirtsleeve, he stood next to Lightning Chaser with a hand on the colt’s neck. Stroking. Slowly. Gently.And his words, they were too quiet to hear, but the cadence almost sounded like…a lullaby.

And in that moment the juxtaposition hit Tyler, hit him in a way that nothing else had. The kid had been there all night. He’d been arm to arm with the men. He’d been the one to shove a glass of cold water into Tyler’s hands, and now he was bloody singing to his horse. Lightning Chaser stood there quietly with his head bowed, but his ears perked, almost relaxed despite the equipment monitoring his vitals.

The last time Tyler had seen him he’d been fleeing the fire with Tyler’s shirt covering his eyes.

Tyler stood there now, in the back room of the medical clinic, alone for the first time since he’d crawled between his sheets and forced himself to count wallabies over ten hours before. And everything started to rush. The brightly lit room whirled around him, bringing with it the bullhorn and the shouting, the cries of the horses. It all rushed around him like some sick, twisted soundtrack that refused to die.

Then the boy shifted, and the hair slipped from beneath the tattered bush hat.

Blond.

Long.

Like goddamn sunshine.

Chapter Four

She sensed him before she heard him. She stood there in the brightly lit back room with her hand on Lightning Chaser’s velvety neck, not trusting herself to move. She hadn’t wanted him to find her like this.

She hadn’t wanted him to find her at all.

From the relative quiet of Whittleson Stud, where her father’s former trainer Sam Whittleson had invited her to stay despite his absence, she’d heard the bullhorn, and the horrible rush of cold had been immediate.

In horse country, the sound of a bullhorn breaking the night could only mean one thing.

She’d run to the window and seen the strobe gyrating against the darkness to the east in the direction of Lochlain.

Everything else was a blur. She’d thrown on clothes and run to her car, sped toward the awful red glow. That’s what people did. That’s what everyone in the shire did. When there was trouble, everyone came. Everyone helped.

That’s what she told herself. She was there because it was the right thing to do, because horses were in trouble and every able body was needed.

But the second she’d seen Tyler emerging from the smoke, tall and commanding, that air of authority enveloping him despite the horror drenching his eyes, she’d known the truth.

She’d come for Tyler.

She stood there now with her back to him, not allowing herself to move. Because if she moved she would turn, and if she turned and saw him, the urge to go to him and put her arms around him…

She should have gone home. She should have slipped out with the sunrise, once the fire was under control and she knew Tyler was okay.

But Tyler was not okay, and Darci wasn’t sure he ever would be again. Lochlain was his life, the horses, every one of them, his children. Once, he’d almost lost it all. That had been the price all those years ago, the fallout from a stupid schoolgirl desire she’d been unable to control.

This time, she knew…this time would be different. It had to be. She’d left Australia a girl, but she’d returned a young woman. She had goals. She was deliberate, methodical. And she wasn’t about to fall into the same trap she’d fallen into before. She had a career to build, a future to claim.

But she couldn’t just stand there like a coward, either, not when she could feel him behind her, watching.

Not when she knew that her hair had given her away. Slowly, she turned. And slowly, she saw. He stood not five meters behind her, in a shaft of sunlight cutting in from a high window. It exposed him—the smoke smeared against his face and the battered Akubra hat he always wore, the grime on his clothes and the rips in the once-white undershirt. They exposed the minor burns and dried blood on the arm that hung oddly at his side—blood she knew his mother had tried to wipe away.

But it was his eyes that got her. Normally they gleamed like raw emeralds. Normally the deep dark green glimmered with intensity and enthusiasm, with energy, excitement. Awareness.

Now they were grim, flat…and so damn agonized she almost forgot every promise she’d made to herself, every goal. Every dream. Because in that one moment, there was only Tyler Preston…and the low, hard thrum of her heart.

“You’re hurt,” she said inanely, and like a fool, she started toward him. Toward Tyler.

Once, all those years ago, when she’d caught his eye and sashayed over, when she’d worn low-rise jeans and a flirty tank top, he’d lounged against the wall with a drink in his hand, and watched. His eyes had gleamed.

Now he turned, and walked away.

Darci stopped midstride and watched him make his way toward the front of the clinic, where the team of veterinarians examined the horses as quickly as possible. She’d heard them for the past thirty minutes, since she’d slipped in to check on Lightning. Over and over and over, the prognosis was the same: severe smoke inhalation. The horses would live…most of them.

But Lochlain’s finest would never race again.

Her throat worked. She fought against it, fought against the hot sting of moisture in her eyes. But then she turned and saw Lightning Chaser watching her through those gentle, melted-chocolate eyes, and she couldn’t fight it anymore. The tears came.

“Sweet boy,” she murmured, stepping into him and wrapping her arms around his neck, nuzzling her face against his mane. “You didn’t deserve this.”

None of them had.

For a long while, she just stood there, holding and stroking Tyler’s horse, whispering, singing the lullaby her mother had once sung to her. The words came easily, but with the years the sound of Anne’s voice had faded from the last corners of memory.

“You’re going to be okay, big guy,” she promised Lightning Chaser. Then, with one last kiss to the side of his face, she turned and went in search of Andrew.

“You need to let someone look at that, Ty.”

He looked away from the X-ray of Anthem’s lungs toward Russ, who was studying him as intently as he’d been watching each horse he examined.

She was gone, he knew. He’d heard her leave. Only a few minutes before he’d heard her singing again.

Before that, he’d heard her crying.

He’d almost turned. Like a needy little boy he’d almost turned and gone to her, yanked her into his arms and buried his face in her hair, breathed her in. Held on.

“It’s fine,” he barked now, frowning when he realized he’d been unconsciously cradling his left arm. “Just a little sore.”

Russ crossed the sterile room and put his hands to Tyler’s forearm. “Here, let me—”

Tyler swore the second Russ shifted his arm.

Grim-eyed, Russ released the arm and stepped back. “I’m betting it’s broken,” he said, but Tyler didn’t think so. If his arm were broken, he would know it, feel—

Feel it. Feel something.

“You can’t wrestle fifteen-hundred-kilogram animals and expect not to get hurt,” Russ lectured. Despite the ten years he had on Tyler, they’d practically grown up together. It was only recently that Russ’s aging father had turned his equine practice over to his son. “Get it checked for me, okay?” he said as the phone on the wall started to ring. He grabbed it, muttered a few words before handing it to Tyler. “It’s Peggy.”

Tyler took the receiver, but it was not his office manager’s voice that greeted him. It was a Yank.

“I just heard,” his cousin Robbie said. “Andrew filled me in. How’s Lightning Chaser?”

Tyler glanced toward one of the stalls in the back room, where the three-year-old now stood alone. “Stable.”

“Well, thank God for that,” Robbie said. The youngest of Tyler’s three male cousins, Robbie had always been the easiest to talk to. Whereas the older Kentucky Prestons had a taste for the business side of racing, for Robbie, it had always been about the horses. “Look, if there’s anything I can do, I’m there. Just let me know.”

Turning toward the window, Tyler looked beyond the pile of rubble that had, twenty-four hours before, been a state-of-the-art barn, and assessed the horses. Their ranks were thinning. Close to thirty had already gone home with neighbors. They would live there until Lochlain could rebuild.

“I appreciate that,” Tyler said. He did. “But I don’t really know—”

“Anything,” Robbie said. “I’ve got room here at Quest. I know it’s a long trip, but I can take in as many horses as you need. They can stay here, I can train them until you’re back up and running…”

Robbie kept talking, but the words ran together. Tyler looked from the horses to the paddock, where Andrew and Daniel led two colts and a filly toward a waiting trailer. All his life there’d been the Kentucky Prestons, and the Australian Prestons. Tyler’s father had never spoken an ill word of his brother, Thomas, but the undercurrent had been there. The competitiveness. That’s why David Preston had left America. That’s why David had founded Lochlain. He’d needed an entire ocean to get out from his brother’s shadow and create his own legacy.

The families had gotten together occasionally, for weddings, funerals, but there’d always been a line. A divide. His blue-blooded Kentucky cousins had grown up with everything. Their position in the racing community had been established before they’d even been born. In Australia, Tyler’s father had started with little more than dirt and dreams.

But here, now, as he watched Andrew, hot and sweaty and laboring beneath the blistering sun, with his shirtsleeves rolled up and soot still covering his face, with Robbie on the phone from half a world away, offering to help in any way possible, the invisible bonds of family wrapped around Tyler, and he realized just how strong the Preston blood ran.

Over the past year they’d all been targeted. Scandal had rocked them, every single one of them. His American cousins had been stripped of both the Kentucky Derby and Preakness titles and their racing privileges. They’d come bloody close to losing everything. But they’d endured. They’d banded together and cleared the family name. They’d emerged stronger, more unified than ever.

And now they were here.

Tyler wound down the call with Robbie and started outside, stopped when he saw Darci approach Andrew. Still dressed like a scraggly ranch hand, but with her blond hair tangled around her face and the puppy Tulloch at her heel, she hurried up to Andrew with a glass in her hand… and offered it to him.

It was hardly an intimate act. Darci was Andrew’s employee. Andrew was hot, tired. She was just bringing him something to drink.

But something dark and hard twisted through Tyler. Frowning, he ignored the burn and turned back to Anthem’s X-ray.

She found him at the far paddock. He stood with his back to her, staring at some point on the horizon. She’d seen him off and on for the past few hours talking with the fire brigade and Detective Sergeant Hastings, walking the smoldering remains of his barns with his father and shaking hands with several neighbours, who’d come to offer shelter to Lochlain’s horses.

Now, for the first time all afternoon, he stood alone. There was an unnatural stillness to him, as if some kind of invisible barrier separated him from the rest of the world. Darci knew better than to go to him, knew she should just go home. He’d walked away from her earlier. There was no place for her in this day.

But with the lemon cordial she’d gotten from Tyler’s mother in hand, she quietly covered the hard, dusty ground separating her from Tyler.

She knew he sensed her presence. She could tell by the way his body changed. It was subtle, but he stiffened, went a little more rigid.

“Tyler,” she said as the hot wind blew against her face. Her body ached from head to toe. She’d been up all night. She should be tired. But the rush of adrenaline refused to let go.

He didn’t turn, didn’t say a word. Just kept standing there looking out on the parched rolling hills of Lochlain. They’d been spared. If the wind had picked up during the night, the fire could have spread from the barn complex to the bush.

Somehow, she didn’t think that was the right thing to say. “Here,” she said, extending the glass even though he’d yet to look at her. “I thought you might be thirsty.”

He did turn then. He turned with a near violence that stunned her, and stared down at her from beneath the brim of his bush hat as if she’d just shoved a knife into his gut.

His eyes…they’d been flat before.

Now they gleamed. It wasn’t the roguish sexual gleam from all those years before, but a hard, predatory gleam that sent her heart into a cruel rhythm.

She wanted to step closer. Instinct warned her to step back. Instead, with the sun baking against her skin, she forced her mouth to curve into the same kind of tight, aching smile she’d given her father in those dark months after her mother had died.

“Lemon cordial,” she said, lifting her hand. “You’ve got to be parched.”

He looked from the sweaty glass to her face, and something inside her twisted. And in that moment, all those years, all the lies and truths, the consequences, fell away, and there was just her and Tyler.

“I know you’re exhausted,” she said quietly. She’d tried to forget about him. She’d wanted to forget about him. But sometimes, alone at night in her father’s stuffy London town house, memories would stir. Sometimes it was the accent that would jar her, sometimes the name Preston. Several months before, it had been the man himself. She’d been about to switch the channel when coverage of the Queensland Stakes had come on, and she’d seen him. He’d been part of a profile on his brilliant three-year-old, Lightning Chaser, and the reemergence of Lochlain Racing.

She’d sat there, frozen. Aching.

When she’d run into his cousin Andrew a few months later, it had seemed that fate had gift wrapped the chance she’d never thought to receive: the ability to make things right for Tyler.

“Maybe you should head on inside,” she said.

He looked beyond her toward the barn, where a member of the fire brigade led a muscular yellow Lab through the remains. The dog’s name was Millie, and she had a talent for sniffing out accelerants.

“Your arm,” she said, and without thinking she reached for him. “Have you had it looked at?” Her hand brushed his left wrist. “I noticed you’re favoring it—”

He didn’t jerk away as she’d expected, instead just stood a breath away and bloody near pierced her with the gleam in his eyes. “You brought me a lemon cordial.”

The sting was quick and brutal, and with it her throat tightened. But then his voice registered—not harsh or mocking as it had been the day before, but raw and hoarse and…gentle, almost.

“Do you have any idea—” He moved so fast she had no time to prepare. No time to step back. He crushed the distance between them and brought a hand to her face, stroked the hair back from her cheek. “What were you thinking? What in God’s name were you thinking coming out here in the middle of the night?”

That was easy. She didn’t stop to edit or plan, didn’t stop to consider implications. The truth, something she’d kept too much of from him six years before, simply came out.

“I heard the bullhorn,” she said, rocked by the feel of his roughened fingers against her skin. “And I saw the strobe.” And she’d wanted to throw up. “I knew it was Lochlain and I couldn’t…” The words, the awful possibilities, jammed in her throat. “I had to be here,” she said. “I had to come.”

“You could have been hurt,” he said, sliding his hand down to her arm, where cuts and bruises crisscrossed her flesh. “You could have—”

“So could you have,” she shot back. “The way you kept running back into that barn—” The memory chilled her. That last time, when he’d eventually come out with Lightning Chaser, he’d been in too long. She’d grabbed the firefighters as soon as they’d arrived, had begged them to go in after him….

“I had to,” he said. “They trusted me.”

And to him, she knew that said it all.

“I could hear them…” His words trickled off into the buzz of activity coming from the barn, but above the wind and the voices she could hear them, too. Hear the horses. Their panicked cries would haunt her for a long time.

“You got them out,” she said, and now she was touching him, a hand on each of his upper arms, pushing up on her toes as if not a day, a lie, stood between them. “You did everything humanly possible.”

The lines of his face tightened. “So did you.”

The words were so quiet she wasn’t sure whether she’d heard them or imagined them.

“You should go now,” he said, and the disappointment cut to the quick.

He stepped back but did not release her, kept his hands on her body as he openly inspected her, his gaze sliding from her face to the damp, smoke-stained shirt and jeans clinging to her body. “Take a shower,” he said. “Get some rest.”

She felt her back go a little straighter. “There’ll come a time for resting, Tyler, but it’s not now.” Lifting her chin, she again extended the glass. “Now here, drink.”

His eyes sparked, reminding her for a brief heartbeat of the brash young man she’d first seen on television one Sunday afternoon, telling anyone who cared to listen the proper way to saddle a horse.

“I know what you think of me,” she said, swiping a tangled strand of sooty hair from her face. “But I’m not that spoiled girl you remember from six years ago.”

He took the lemonade and brought it to his mouth, drank it in one long sip. But his eyes never left hers. “You have no idea what I remember.”

From a starkly cloudless sky, the sun seared even hotter. “Then tell me.”

Chapter Five

The words, soft, challenging, slipped through Tyler, burning where seconds before, the lemon cordial had cooled. He looked at her standing next to the dusty white fence with her chin lifted and the hair falling in her face, her eyes filled with a glow he’d tried to forget.

She’d been at Lochlain since the fire. She’d led horses to the far pasture. She’d tended to him under the cover of darkness. She’d given him a drink, damn it. She’d soothed shaken members of his staff.

She’d sung to Lightning Chaser, and she’d cried.

Over sixteen hours after arriving, she still wore the same stained, torn clothes. Only her hair was different, no longer stuffed inside a cap, but hanging loose and tangled around her face. In place of makeup she wore soot and fatigue and grief, but somehow, goddammit, she still looked beautiful.

And he wanted to touch. So brutally bad he refused to let himself move. Because more than touch, he wanted to taste. He wanted to crush her in his arms and bury his face in her hair, to slide his mouth to hers and forget—

For-bloody-get.

It was the word that got him, the word that stopped him. He stepped back and looked toward the hulking remains of Barn B, where his father and Detective Hastings strode toward him, with Beverly Morgan following closely behind. Their expressions were tight, unreadable, and before they reached him, he knew. He knew what the news would be. What the arson dog had detected.

“Thanks for the drink,” he said with the politeness typically reserved for strangers. The spark in Darci’s eyes went flat, but already he was handing her the glass and turning toward the approaching trio.

His barn complex lay in ruins. He’d lost two horses, might lose several more. Lightning Chaser would never race again.

Now was not the time to wonder if Darci Parnell could possibly taste as sweet as she looked.

“Have that arm looked at,” she said quietly, and if there was a note of hurt in her voice, he reminded himself just how dangerous illusions could be.

With narrowed eyes he watched her walk into the glare of the lowering sun as his father drew near, watched her hair sway against her back as she once again headed forAndrew.

“Millie found an accelerant,” Hastings said. “Near what your father says used to be the tack room.”

Swearing softly, Tyler looked toward the blue-and-white checked crime-scene tape stretched around the barn. In the nearby shade, two of the border collies drank greedily from a bowl of water Darci had brought over.

“There are faint trails leading to both the other barns,” Hastings added.

“We’re lucky we didn’t lose all three,” Tyler’s father said. “It could have been a hell of a lot worse.”

The confirmation of his suspicions sickened him. Someone had torched his barns. Someone had started a fire while the animals were inside, sleeping. If things had only been a little different—

“Someone was supposed to be watching.” They had a rotation. Someone was awake at all times, walking the grounds, monitoring the surveillance feed….

Hastings glanced at his notepad. “Fella named Reynard had first shift, but turned it over to a kid named Craig around midnight.”

Tyler nodded. Reynard was new to Lochlain; Craig Stevens had grown up there. His father was one of the assistant trainers. Craig was an exercise rider. He wanted to be a jockey.

“He’s a good kid,” Tyler said.

“Says he heard a noise over by the office and went to check it out. Didn’t see anything, so he went to get a drink. He was on his way back when he smelled smoke.”

“He sounded the alarm, did everything right,” David added. “But he’s torn up something awful. His dad is with him now.”

Tyler looked at the three of them, Hastings all business, his father grim-eyed, the insurance investigator ominously quiet. She didn’t need to say anything. What she was thinking—what anyone would think—was clear.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.